Black Mail (2012) (22 page)

McAteer glowered in Shuggie’s direction, but offered no resistance to being handcuffed.

‘Unit B, sir,’ crackled in Shearer’s ear. ‘Subject has been subdued and apprehended. No rounds fired. No police or civilian casualties.’

Simon Ramsay was sitting on his own outside The Rock, nursing a Budweiser and smoking a cigarette, when a call came through on his mobile.

‘Simon, it’s Bjorn.’

‘Did you manage to get it organised?’

‘You’ll have your fifty thousand pounds tomorrow.’

‘That’s great, Bjorn! I knew you’d be able to do it if you put your mind to it.’

‘I’ll need your bank account details to transfer the funds.’

Pulling his chequebook from his jacket pocket, Ramsay read out the relevant information. ‘How soon can I have access to the money?’ he demanded.

‘By lunchtime tomorrow.’

‘Thanks, Bjorn. That’s one I owe you.’

It was two hours and several Budweisers later when Ramsay’s mobile rang again.

‘Good evening, Pervert,’ the familiar, Dalek-like voice intoned.

‘I’ll have the money tomorrow,’ he whispered into the mouthpiece.

‘Excellent!’

‘There’s just one problem.’

‘That’s not what I want to hear, Pervert.’ The tone was menacing.

‘The money will be in my account by lunchtime tomorrow but I can hardly walk into my bank with a suitcase and ask for fifty thousand pounds in cash in small-denomination notes, can I?’

‘That’s for you to sort out,’ he snapped. ‘Either I get the fifty grand tomorrow or the world and his wife – which includes your wife, by the way – will get to hear about your little indiscretion.’

‘Be reasonable, for Christ’s sake! How about if I pay you in instalments over the next few days? Say, a few thousand at a time?’ There was an ominous silence at the other end of the line ‘There’s no way the bank will let me withdraw fifty thousand in cash all in one go. How about it?’ he pleaded.

‘You’re leaving me with a difficult decision, Pervert.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Whether your photo will appear in the papers tomorrow – or whether I should save it for a big splash on Sunday.’

‘Hold on a minute!’

The communication was cut.

When Charlie Anderson arrived at Pitt Street early the following morning he found someone waiting for him at reception. Having introduced himself, Jim Cuthbertson followed Charlie up the stairs.

‘How bad is this, Inspector?’ Cuthbertson asked as they were entering Charlie’s office.

‘It couldn’t be much worse. Your daughter has confessed to hiring a hit man to murder a supposed blackmailer. However, we have yet to establish whether or not any blackmail attempt was actually made.’

‘What has she been charged with?’

‘Conspiracy to murder.’

‘Where is she being held?’

‘Cornton Vale.’

‘Will you oppose bail?’

‘That won’t be my decision.’

‘Have you arrested Simon Ramsay?’

‘No.’

‘Why the hell not?’ Cuthbertson exploded. ‘Laura told you he was the instigator of all this!’

‘Mr Ramsay claims to know nothing about it.’

‘I don’t give a shit about what he claims! He put Laura up to it, for Christ’s sake! Why is he not under arrest?’

‘I’m not prepared to discuss Mr Ramsay’s situation with you, Mr Cuthbertson.’

‘You mean to say you’re going to charge my daughter with conspiracy to murder and let that miserable little bastard walk away scot-free!’

‘That’s not what I said. If Ramsay’s implicated he’ll be charged in due course.’

‘That’s not good enough!’

‘Mr Cuthbertson, your daughter has confessed to hiring McAteer to commit a murder. Instead of getting hot under the collar about Simon Ramsay you would be well advised to direct your energies towards ensuring that she gets the best possible legal representation.’

‘When I want your advice on what’s in my daughter’s best interests, I’ll ask for it!’

Charlie bristled. ‘And when I want your advice on who I should be arresting, I’ll be sure to let you know!’

Cuthbertson stared hard at Charlie. ‘Have you tracked down this McAteer character?’

‘He’s in custody.’

‘Surely he’ll be able to point the finger at Ramsay?’

‘I realise I’m in danger of repeating myself, Mr Cuthbertson, but forget about Ramsay! If there’s a case for him to answer, we’ll deal with it.’

‘Laura is sensitive and impressionable. She would never have got herself mixed up in anything like this unless that bastard had pushed her into it.’

‘Perhaps you should try to find out who gave your daughter the money to pay off McAteer, Mr Cuthbertson? Whoever it was certainly didn’t do her any favours. If he’d come to us instead we might have been able to apprehend McAteer
before
he had the chance to scar your daughter for life.’

‘I don’t like your attitude, Anderson,’ Cuthbertson snarled. ‘I’ll have you know I’ll be taking this up with Superintendent Hamilton!’

Charlie shrugged. ‘Your prerogative.’ Jim Cuthbertson cursed under his breath as he stomped out of the office.

A young girl nervously approached the main reception desk in Pitt Street. ‘Is this where I come to give information about the murder in Kelvingrove Park last Saturday?’ she asked hesitantly.

PC Lillian McArthur looked her up and down. Early twenties, she reckoned. The girl had a fair complexion,
deep-green
, intelligent eyes, and her shoulder-length blonde hair was fastened back with a wooden clasp. She was wearing a light blue anorak and had a Glasgow University medical faculty scarf wrapped round her neck.

‘It’s as good a place to start as any,’ Lillian said reassuringly. ‘What have you got for us?’

‘I saw a car pull up at the bottom of Kelvin Way just before eight o’clock on the morning of the murder. I know the registration number – or at least, part of it.’

‘Hold on a minute.’ Lillian picked up the desk phone and tapped in Colin Renton’s extension. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked as the phone was ringing out.

‘Lesley McDougall.’

‘Lillian McArthur at reception, Colin,’ she said when Renton picked up. ‘There’s a young lady here called Lesley McDougall who thinks she might have some useful information on the Harrison murder. Can you talk to her?’

‘Sure. Send her up.’

‘I think it was a Jaguar.’ Lesley McDougall twisted nervously on a strand of loose hair as she took the seat opposite Renton. I can’t be a hundred per cent sure of that but the registration definitely contained the letters LAM. I’m certain of that.’

‘How come you’re so sure?’

‘LAM. Lesley Anne McDougall. My initials. I’d been at Daft Friday. Have you heard of it? It’s an all-night ball in the University Union.’

‘I tend not to mix in those circles, Ms McDougall.’

Lesley blushed, twisting harder on her hair. ‘Lindsay – she’s my flatmate – and I came out of the Union about eight o’clock on Saturday morning. The guys we had gone to the dance with were both the worse for wear and they’d crashed out in the Beer Bar so we decided to leave them to it and head off home. We were standing at the top of the Union steps, trying to flag down a cab, when I noticed a car driving past and pulling up at the bottom of Kelvin Way. It caught my eye because the registration was the same as my initials. I thought it was a sign.’ She blushed even deeper. ‘I was at the giggly stage, I’m afraid. So was Lindsay. I was, like – let’s go across and chat up the driver, but Lindsay wasn’t having any of it. She was, like – no way! Let’s get a taxi and go home. I tried to pull her across the road but a cab came by and she flagged it down and dragged me into the back seat.’

‘Did you notice any of the numbers on the Jag’s licence plate?’

Lesley shook her head. ‘Sorry.’

‘Why did it take you so long to come forward with this information, Ms McDougall?’ Renton asked.

‘I don’t listen much to the news. It was only when some of my friends were discussing the murder in the pub yesterday that I realised it took place round about the time Lindsay and I came out of the Union.’

‘Hold on a minute, Dad.’ Helen Cuthbertson transferred the phone to her other hand and closed the kitchen door to drown out Bjorn’s strident singing which was emanating from the shower. ‘Okay, go on. I can hear you now.’

‘Brace yourself for a shock,’ Jim Cuthbertson said tersely.

‘Shock?’

‘Laura has been arrested for conspiracy to murder her husband.’

‘What!’

‘She’s apparently been having an affair with Simon Ramsay for the past couple of years.’ There was a stunned silence at the other end of the line. ‘It appears that Mike found out about their affair,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘and resorted to blackmail. It seems that he managed to get his hands on a photo of Laura and Simon in bed together and he contacted Ramsay, threatening to expose him if he didn’t come up with fifty thousand pounds. Simon told Laura about the threat and he talked her into hiring someone called McAteer to kill the blackmailer, though at that stage they had no idea that Mike was involved.’

‘My God!’

‘To make matters worse,’ Cuthbertson continued, ‘Ramsay is now claiming he knows nothing about any blackmail attempt and he’s told the police that Laura was acting on her own when
she hired McAteer to kill Mike. The little shit is trying to wash his hands of everything and leave Laura to carry the can.’

‘The bastard! What kind of state is Laura in?’

‘I haven’t seen her. I was up in Aberdeen when she phoned me yesterday. She sounded frightened – and very confused. She can’t reconcile the fact that Mike knew about her affair with Ramsay – yet he carried on at home as if nothing was wrong.’

‘Given what Mike’s temper was like, I can see what she means. You say she’s been arrested?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where are they holding her?’

‘Cornton Vale. I’m going up to see her this morning. Do you want to come along?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll pick you up in half an hour.’

Bjorn Svensson pulled on his knee-length, Paisley pattern dressing gown as he came out of the bathroom, whistling and towelling his head briskly. ‘You look stunned,’ he said, eyeing Helen’s glazed expression as she sat at the kitchen table with the phone still clasped in her hand. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘You’re not going to believe this!’ she said, wide-eyed.

Bjorn sat down and listened in silence while Helen recounted the conversation she’d just had with her father. When she’d finished, he got to his feet. ‘Come through to the lounge,’ he said, retying the cord of his dressing gown and draping his towel around his shoulders. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

The large lounge was sparsely furnished: beige fitted carpet, a rectangular, chrome and glass coffee table and a white leather four-piece suite with several black scatter cushions. Helen sat down on the low-backed settee while Bjorn remained standing.

‘Simon Ramsay tried to shaft me yesterday,’ he stated.

‘What?’

‘He turned up at the bank and threatened to expose my fiddle if I didn’t help him out.’

‘The bastard! What kind of help was he looking for?’

‘Fifty thousand quid’s worth.’

Helen sprang to her feet. ‘What the hell does he think he’s playing at –’

‘Let me explain,’ Bjorn said, easing her back down onto the settee and sitting beside her. ‘This is a lot more complicated than you think.’

‘More complicated?’ Helen looked totally confused.

‘You remember Mike and Laura went on a cruise to Thailand last summer?’

‘How could I forget? Laura almost bored me to death with her interminable holiday snaps.’

‘They went on that cruise with Simon and Jude,’ Bjorn continued. ‘When they put into Bangkok, Mike and Simon went ashore to have a few beers, but they had an argument and split up. Mike wandered around the city centre on his own and he stumbled across a brothel. The woman in charge tried to interest him in having sex with underage kids, but he didn’t want to know. They got talking and she told him that her clients liked to have their sex sessions recorded as a souvenir and she told him that she often made additional copies without the clients’ knowledge. She offered to sell some of these to Mike and he ended up negotiating to buy a batch of DVDs and arranging to have them shipped back to Glasgow. He saw it as an opportunity to make a killing by editing the recordings and selling them on to paedophile organisations. However, when the discs arrived a
few weeks later, Mike was astonished to find that one of them was a film of Simon having sex with a young Asian girl.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ There was total disbelief in Helen’s voice. ‘How on earth do you know all this? How are you involved?’

‘Mike came to me for technical advice. He was desperate for money and he’d decided to screw Simon for every penny he could get out of him – there was no love lost between those two, let me tell you. Mike offered to cut me in for ten percent if I’d show him how to transfer images from a DVD to a PC-compatible format so he could send Simon a sample image by email.’

‘And you agreed to help him?’

‘When he showed me what Simon was doing to that kid I didn’t even ask for a cut. That bastard really is sick. I went round to Mike’s place one night when you were in Rio and I transferred a few images from the disc to his computer. I also set up a Hotmail account for him in the name of Liam Black and showed him how to include an image as an attachment to an email. I even knocked up a voice synthesiser for him to use when he phoned Simon so his voice wouldn’t be recognised.

‘To really get Simon going,’ Bjorn continued, ‘Mike sent him an email from the Hotmail account, including an image of him interfering with the young girl, just before he went to the birthday dinner. Simon must’ve been at his wits’ end. He phoned me at work the following day and asked me if an email could be traced back to the originator and I scared the living daylights out of him by offering to go round to his house to check it out for him.’

‘Laura didn’t say anything about this to Dad.’

‘She doesn’t know about it.’

‘Then how on earth did she get mixed up in all this?’

‘Simon needed to get his hands on some serious money to stop the blackmailer blowing the whistle – Mike was demanding fifty thousand quid – so I reckon he went to Laura for help in raising the money.’

‘But Laura told Dad that a blackmailer had sent Simon a photo of them in bed together.’

‘I reckon Simon must have invented that story because he knew there was no way Laura would help him if she knew the real reason he was being blackmailed.’

‘But Laura told Dad that Simon showed her the photo of them screwing in the Hilton – the one the blackmailer was supposed to have sent. Where on earth could that have come from?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘But … of course!’ Helen said, snapping her fingers. ‘That would explain why Mike didn’t go ballistic with Laura. Mike was blackmailing Simon because he had a recording of him interfering with a young girl in Thailand, but he knew nothing about Simon and Laura having an affair. But Simon wouldn’t want the blackmailer to be paid off,’ she continued. ‘With a recording like that in his possession he knew the blackmail demands would never stop. He needed to have him killed, so he talked Laura into hiring a hit man. This is incredible!’

‘It was almost me who got killed.’

‘What!’

‘I’d agreed with Mike that I’d go to Kelvingrove Park to pick up the money. Mike wanted to stay on at Ronnie McGavigan’s place for breakfast after the poker school so he would have a cast-iron alibi for the time the money was handed over. However, I opted out because the handover clashed with my mother’s
birthday party. Mike tried to talk me out of making the trip to Sweden, but when I told him I was adamant he decided to pick the money up himself. When you phoned me in Stockholm and told me Mike had been shot in Kelvingrove Park I nearly had a heart attack.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ The colour ebbed from Helen’s cheeks. ‘Is there any way this can be traced back to you, Bjorn?’

‘I don’t think so. Mike and I exchanged a few emails. Nothing incriminating, just arranging times and places to meet. To be on the safe side I told Mike to delete those emails, as well as the one he sent to Simon, and I showed him how to erase the DVD images completely from his computer.’